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Kong Mirrors Real Evolutionary Paths
CNN has an article pointing out that, though King Kong may be a little extreme, evolutionary gigantism is not out of the question on remote islands. From the article: "There are many examples of what biologists term 'gigantism' on islands. These include the Komodo dragons, the world's largest lizards which can be 10 feet long or more and weigh up to 500 pounds. Found on a few small Indonesian islands, the Komodo -- a recorded man-eater -- is in many ways as chilling as anything from Jackson's fertile imagination."
"King Kong," which is reigning at the North American box office this holiday season...
CNN should label these articles as advertisements. There's little science in the story, and certainly nothing new.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Uhhh, I hate to nitpick, but which creatures did Jackson imagine in this remake?
Not to say that the man isn't creative or imaginative, but he certainly didn't invent King Kong...or the brachiosaurus or the T-Rex or the Velociraptor or or or....
If anyone should get the credits for inventing King Kong, shouldn't it be Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace? Not to mention previous works by Jules Verne and others...
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
One point in the article seems incorrect to me.
:) were every bit as big as fancy mice, four inches or more long from nose to tail base. Going by volume they were well over three times the size of their parents, probably closer to 5. All it took was a regular diet of pet mouse grains, crickets and burger mince.
The house mice -- believed to have made their way to Gough decades ago on sealing and whaling ships -- have evolved to about three times their normal size.
I have raised a couple of generations of house mice from a captured pair at my parent's place, and while that original pair were the same size as any other house mouse, about an inch and a half from nose to the base of their tail, their offspring raised in my tank and fed well (ok, overfed
They were certainly fatter, but also MUCH larger at a base level.
http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/2005/11/21/w
My choice quote - at the very end, and the only tenuous link to the present subject:
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Content free article (or has that already been proposed?)
Being the cool dudes we are, let's shorten that to CFA. There's nothing even mildly interesting in the linked article. It reads like an advertisement for King Kong.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
This reads like a story invented in a Reuters reporter's head, with out-of-context quotes from scientists to support his clever idea. Anybody that followed the homo floresiensis story knows that large mammals tend to become dwarves on islands.
Coconut crabs (Birgus Latro) are pretty huge. They co-exist only with birds that are non-threatening on small tropical islands. It is probably the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world. http://www.arkive.org/species/GES/invertebrates_te rrestrial_and_freshwater/Birgus_latro/
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you totally missed the point of king kong
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
This guy has been on Coast to Coast AM a couple times to speak about gigantism in people. He has a pretty extensive website. From the intro:
When a website contains a phrase like this:
"I have invested over 30 years researching the vast history of giants. It has, for the most part, been kept from the public. Proof of giants' existence - their skeletal remains - has been quickly secreted away in obscure museums, when not destroyed."
You know it is not worth reading. Yet more pseudoscience combined with conspiracy theories...... how boring.
If anyone's interested, the principal described in the article is a special case of something called Foster's rule -- which you can google if interested.
In my opinion, more interesting than the giant species are pgymy species also created by the same effect. Pygmy Mammoths likely survived far longer than their gigantic counterparts before going extinct, as there is evidence of them being alive as recently as 5000 years ago on a few select islands. In fact, if I recall correctly, there is an egyptian painting which many suggest appears to be the pharoah or some lesser ruler recieving one as a gift. My details on this are a bit sketchy, so those genuinely interested should take their queries to google . . .
Some of you may also remember the somewhat controversial discovery of a species of pygmy hominid described as "hobbit-like" that was discussed on Slashdot about a year back -- those fossils were also from a rather isolated island . . .
The problem is the square/cube ratio. Double all linear dimensions, and volumes / weights go up by a factor of eight; areas only go up by a factor of four. So exactly doubling a creature would double the amount of weight per unit area, and the joints wouldn't be strong enough.
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100% pure freak
I love how nobody at Slashdot seems to understand sourcing an article.
CNN has an article ------------ No. Nope. Wrong.
CNN is running an article. ------------ YES!
CNN is running a Reuters article. Learn to understand the god damn difference. This article is running on dozens of other sites out there, yet you just gave CNN credit for it. If I were one of these AP, Reuters, AFP, UPI, or [insert wire service here] writers, I'd be annoyed when nobody could figure out how to properly attribute my work.
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I recently reread Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond. In it, he describes the extinction of many large species that grew up on remote islands.
... in most cases, not even leaving a generation to try to adapt to our presence. For this reason, they were quickly killed without fearing us.
We're all familiar with the dodo bird which was a fairly large species but there were also appearant extinctions of other large animals in the Polynesian Islands.
The reason for their extinction is that they grew up without modern man on their islands. Now, animals that live in Africa like the giraffe, wildebeest, hippo, etc were exposed to the evolution of man. Our initial stone weapons didn't kill all the targets but gave them time to adjust genetically and grow wary and eventually instinctively fear humans.
Those that didn't were killed.
Once the remote island mega fauna became exposed to humans and their advanced iron or steel weapons, they did not have the time to adjust to fear us. And our weapons rarely didn't kill them
A supposed Kong would invariably never fear humans unless their were a race of Kongs and we adapted our 1920's technology to be able to kill them more efficiently.
If you haven't read that book, do so.
My work here is dung.
Peter Jackson was famous in NZ long before he made LOTR, he made a lot of original stuff first.